WASHINGTON --
Administration officials promised Wednesday to make changes before the
Christmas travel season in an effort to prevent airline passengers from
suffering the nightmare of being trapped for hours on a tarmac with no
way to reach an airport gate.

"We can move pretty quickly on
this," Federal Aviation Administrator Randy Babbitt told reporters after
hosting a forum with airlines, airports and government officials on
ways to prevent a repeat of an October incident, the most recent.

Twenty-eight
planes -- seven were large international flights -- arrived unexpectedly
at Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn., on Oct. 29 during a
freak snowstorm. The planes were forced to divert because weather and
equipment problems prevented them from landing at New York area
airports.

Many of the flights sat on the ground for hours --
several for more than seven hours -- before they could either refuel and
depart or unload their passengers. The captain of JetBlue flight 504
begged for help to get his plane to a gate, saying passengers were
becoming unruly and he had paraplegic and diabetic passengers who needed
to get off.

Within the next week, the FAA will begin including
airports in national and regional conference calls they hold with
airlines several times a day to discuss problems that are affecting the
flow of air traffic. The agency is also launching a hotline and a
webpage for airports to alert the FAA and airlines of problems on the
ground such as difficulties with as snow removal and deicing equipment
or a shortage of available gates, Babbitt said.

Much of the chaos
during the Hartford incident could have been mitigated by better
communication among airlines, airports and air traffic controllers,
Babbitt said.

If airlines had known so many flights were diverting
to Hartford, some would probably have sent their planes instead to
other airports in Providence, R.I.; Albany, N.Y.; Allentown, Pa.; and
Baltimore, transportation officials said. Bradley, a medium-size
airport, has only 23 gates and typically handles few international
flights, officials said.

"This wasn't anybody's fault
necessarily," Babbitt said. "People just weren't aware of what other
people were doing. That's what we're going to try to alleviate going
forward."

A Transportation Department rule implemented in April
2010 limits tarmac delays to a maximum of three hours before airlines
must allow passengers to get off the plane. Airlines that exceed the
time limit can face fines of up to $27,500 per person. Although
Babbitt's comments appeared to relieve airlines of responsibility for
the Oct. 29 incident, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood emphasized
that his department's investigations into each of the flights that
exceeded the three-hour limit aren't yet complete.

Airlines say
there are a lot of reasons for extended tarmac delays, most related to
airport congestion created by poor weather. If planes are held at gates
because poor weather prevents or slows departures, then incoming flights
have trouble finding a free gate. Sometimes planes sitting for hours in
line waiting to take off are unable to return to gates where new planes
have taken their place. Customs and security officials won't allow
passengers off international flights unless they have enough officials
to process them or a secure place to hold them until they can be
processed.

Airlines, which opposed the three-hour rule, say many
of the delays are beyond their control. For example, one of the problems
at Bradley was that there weren't enough Customs officials on duty to
handle the influx of large international flights with hundreds of
passengers. Indeed, the room Customs officials use at Bradley was far
too small to accommodate all the passengers waiting to be processed that
day, officials said.

The airport received 20 inches of snow
during the storm, which marked the first time that area of Connecticut
had received over an inch of snow in October in more than a century of
record-keeping, a National Weather Service official told the forum.

The
storm knocked out power to the airport several times during the day.
Luggage belts quit working. Tugs that move planes out of the way
couldn't get traction on the ice. Planes had trouble refueling and
de-icing because of the power outages, preventing departures.

If a plane can't get de-iced, "you might as well just weld the aircraft to the ramp -- it's not going anywhere," Babbitt said.

And if planes can't depart, there's no room to unload planes that have landed.

No one, including controllers, had a complete picture of what was happening, Babbitt told the forum.

"There
is a lot of knowledge out there," he said. "If everyone had access to
the whole picture, they wouldn't have continued to send planes to
(Bradley)."

But FAA officials acknowledged they shared some
responsibility for the episode as well. The agency was in the midst of a
scheduled shutdown of navigation equipment for servicing at John F.
Kennedy International Airport when visibility rapidly deteriorated and
winds kicked up. Several industry officials questioned why FAA continued
with the maintenance shutdown in light of the forecast storm, but
LaHood said no one had anticipated a snowstorm that severe in October.

The
problems were exacerbated when other FAA equipment at Kennedy and
nearby Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey malfunctioned
in freezing temperatures. Reports of windshear limited the use of some
runways, forcing changes in flight paths that decreased the number of
planes that could land at Kennedy, Newark, LaGuardia Airport in New York
and Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, which was closed for a time.

More
than a dozen planes were diverted to Logan International Airport in
Boston, but Logan had problems as well. One of the diverted planes was
an Airbus A380, the world's largest commercial passenger plane. Logan,
which doesn't normally serve A380s, had to close a runway for a time
because there was nowhere else to put the supersize plane. Tarmac space
to accommodate planes at Logan was further limited by a military flight
that happened to bring soldiers wounded in Libya to the U.S. for medical
care that day. Logan officials said they had to make room on the tarmac
for 10 ambulances.

An FAA review also found that it wasn't
necessarily obvious to controllers that an unusually large number of
flights were being diverted to Bradley, agency officials said.

Among FAA's proposals to airlines and airports for better information-sharing:

--Creating
a webpage monitored by FAA where airports can continuously update
information. Airline dispatchers could check the site before deciding
where they want to send flights unable to land at their intended
destination. Airlines, rather than controllers, decide which airports
they want to send diverted flights to based on factors such as personnel
and equipment at the airport.

For example, if a plane spends too
much time on the ground, the flight crew may exceed the maximum number
of hours they're allowed to work in a single day under FAA safety
regulations. In those cases, airlines have to find another flight crew
and get them to the plane before the flight can depart.

--Expand
FAA-hosted teleconferences with airlines to include airports. FAA and
airline officials exchange information in teleconferences each day about
weather-related and other difficulties affecting the flow of air
traffic around the country, but airport officials generally don't join
those conversations.

--Create a better system for air traffic
controllers to identify diverted flights. While special handling would
not be provided based sole on diversion status, it would heighten
situational awareness about the potential for congestion on the ground
at airport and for planes in the air to run low on fuel.

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